#my main issues are the limits of scratch as a whole as well as playtesting

[eeveekitti]

hi. hi . hi . i made a warrior cats fan game on scratch when i was young. seeing u post about making one activated all of my childhood programming memories so PRO TIPS FOR FREE

(disclaimer: there are probably other ways of doing these things these r just the ones i came up with lol)

make 2 separate sprites for the standing and walking. the walking sprite should be constantly cycling through its frames. pick one of them to contain the movement code (i always preferred the standing sprite for this) and set the other to always match its position.

then, when an arrow key is pressed, hide the standing sprite and show the walking sprite, and vice versa when released.

thats how i fixed the 'press button for 1 millisecond and sprite has to cycle thru all 8 frames before returning to standing animation' problem

you can extrapolate this logic into an arbitrary number of sprites for separate animations, though you can also include one or more non-looping animations within the standing sprite to save space. as long as your walking sprite is kept separate the player will have instant feedback when they start and stop moving which will rid you of most animation jank.

i dont know if you want any platforming functionality, but if you do:

use separate sprites for the terrain art and terrain hitbox!! it gives you more freedom. (to make a hitbox, you just gotta turn the sprite invisible.)

i also had separate wall detection and floor detection hitboxes to allow the character to do things like walk up inclines. set the wall hitbox to be a little bit off the ground, then if you detect floor but no wall, move the character upward. be warned, you have to make the wall hitbox cover both the front and the back! if the player turns their character backwards while up against a wall, they will be able to glitch up it.

also Do not map the interact button to the same key as advance dialogue. the player Will accidentally skip the first page of dialogue. (also include a slight delay before theyre able to advance to the next page, but not too long or getting out of dialog boxes will become hell)

anyway yeah hope aany of those r helpful GOOD LUCK WITH UR SCRATCH GAME

OOH THAT IS A LOT THANK YOU FOR THE PRO TIPS DSNFJSD?? /POS

i would say more but it is almost 1am i'm going to bed soon but these r really cool actually!! i didn't know a good chunk tbh my knowledge of coding a scratch game extends to the basics of character movement, talking, and making dens work [barely though] [i had a bug where a different background + the cats in it were in the apprentices den for some reason] [i still dont know why and cannot be bothered to figure it out]